Most organizations have a business plan and a set of people programmes, but nothing connecting the two. Programmes get added one at a time, each one sensible on its own, and the result is a set of practices nobody can trace back to a business goal. When the business direction changes, the people side does not move with it, so hiring, structure and culture end up supporting a version of the company that no longer exists.
What we usually hear
We have a business plan, but no clear people plan behind it.
Our culture is not what we say it is, and everyone knows it.
We have HR programmes, but nobody can say what they are for.
We hire and restructure reactively instead of to a plan.
Two teams are solving the same people problem in different ways.
We cannot say which of our people investments are actually working.
If two or three of these sound familiar, the work below is where we would start.
Who this is for
This suits new companies building their people foundation for the first time, and established organizations rebuilding their culture, people services or programmes. It also suits leaders who want their people practices and systems to keep pace with business change.
Key solutions
Turn your business direction into a people strategy with three or four priorities, the measures attached to them, and a clear list of what you will stop doing.
Build the workforce plan and the structure to deliver it. Skills, roles and capacity on one side, decision rights and accountability on the other.
Design the hiring, performance, learning and reward practices that reinforce the strategy, then put them in place working alongside your teams.
How we see it
This is how the pieces connect. Select any step to see what it covers, what we do, and what you are left holding at the end.
Select a step to see the detail
Expected business outcomes
Proof points
Published third-party research. These figures describe the market, not FT Consulting Partners results.
The strongest predictor is how well the people side is managed.
Prosci benchmarked change management effectiveness against project results. Programs with excellent change management were seven times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. The gap is larger than any technology variable.
Source: Prosci benchmarkingMost transformation programs do not deliver what was approved.
Seven in ten large-scale programs miss the goals set out in the business case. The money is spent and the program is closed, but the operating result the board signed off never arrives.
Source: McKinsey & Company7 of 10 programs fall short of their stated goals
In 2009 Netflix published its culture document, setting out the behaviours it expected and the people practices that followed from them, including how it approached performance, pay and freedom in decision making. The document has been read millions of times and is widely studied in business schools.
The transferable point is the order of work. Netflix decided what kind of organization it needed to be first, then designed hiring, performance and reward to match, and removed the practices that worked against it. Most organizations do the reverse, collecting practices first and inferring a culture afterwards.
Send a short brief describing the situation. We respond with an approach, the team who would deliver it, and the measures we report against.
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